Monday 25 November 2013 12.31 EST
First published on Monday 25 November 2013 12.31 EST

Raindrops as big as pears slant over the reclining naked women on their couches. The dangling plaster droplets fill Sadie Coles HQ like a swarm of giant cartoon tadpoles, held aloft on lengths of nylon monofilament. But they're more likely to clonk you in the face or crotch than get you wet.

Fishing line is the sculptor's anti-gravity friend: like fish, we are meant not to notice it, but always do. Rain? Pears? Tadpoles? Each one has been painted, and as you move through the gallery they shift through the spectrum, making a sort of pretty pastel rainbow. They have been part of Urs Fischer's repertoire for a decade.

Fischer's Melodrama is a giant tableau. Amid the perpetual shower, life-size clay figures lay about on clay furniture, rising from a rubble of leftover hands and arms and feet, and twists of discarded clay. Fischer has painted the sculptures, too. There are blue and rose torsos and breasts and bums, scrabbly multicoloured patches, figures that have had paint poured all over them. The paint and the damp clay don't much like each other.

The giant clay raindrops which slant over Urs Fischer's nudes.

The artist and his assistants showed up a couple of weeks ago with 30 tons of wet clay, and just started modelling the women and the furniture. Apparently there were no models, no casting, though the forms are all repeated. They're all similar, all different. None of them is quite Velázquez's Rokeby Venus, but you get the idea. The figures have all lost their heads, if they ever had them. One of the settees has been modelled in the form of a galleon, replete with painted figureheads, the stern decorated with swags of plasticine rope. As I looked, a bit dropped off. On another chaise longue, the figure has been substituted by a giant reclining carrot. A skinny carrot, lean as a life-model's diet. You are what you eat.

One clay couch has nothing on it but a pair of feet. The rest is a slithering quagmire. Fischer's sculptures have a terrific materiality, sitting among their own litter. Over the course of the exhibition, they will further crumble and collapse. Made with this in mind, Fischer presents them arrested in their various states of emergence and decay, creation and destruction. If they weren't also so funny, the room would be a dismal wasteland in the mad, stupid rain.

One chaise longue in Urs Fischer's Melodrama is fashioned into a galleon.

All this is great, absurd fun, although the forms of the sculptures are quite conventional, buxom and mannequin-like. Like us, they have their own built-in decay. It is what gives them the life they have. His earlier wax figures that double as giant candles, which, once lit, drool and melt into gothic puddles, have a similar quality. The light gives life and takes it away.

The Swiss artist undercuts any sense of pathos or drama we might otherwise feel here. There's no humanistic hand-wringing about earth-to-earth or 'the human clay', let alone the human condition, though of course such thoughts do intrude. One also thinks of beach sculptures made of sand, only to be washed away by the tide.

Thomas Schütte's sculpted women on their giant tables and the wax sculptures of Medardo Rosso also come to mind, as do Francis Bacon's squirming meaty figures on their chairs and daybeds. In an earlier show, Fischer invited the audience to make their own sculptures out of freely supplied clay, and in 2011 he collaborated with German artist Georg Herold in modelling clay figures from nude models, who then posed next to the sculptures at the Modern Institute in Glasgow. All this is a very inventive kind of play. Fischer seems to mock a certain kind of artistic worthiness and seriousness. Melodrama is filled with hollow laughter. In the end, we are all just carrots basking in the rain.